March 8, 2011

The Canadian organization Orng, will modify its medical transport system in the coming weeks after working with a team of masters students in the Cornell School of Operations Research and Information Engineering.

Ornge, a non-profit organization based in Ontario, Canada, provides medical transport services to the residents of the province in both emergency and non-emergency situations. The work of the Cornell students will help Ornge reduce cost and improve its transport system.

Overseeing a group of ORIE graduate students, Prof. Shane Henderson, operations research, and Prof. David Shmoys, operations research, have been working together to help Ornge since 2007.

Henderson said Ornge’s services are crucial to Ontario because of the province’s large size. The distance between Toronto, the province’s capital, and the outer regions of the province are comparable to the distance between Toronto and Florida, Henderson said.

Cornell’s work with Ornge was divided into multiple projects. In the first project, which began in September 2007, the Cornell graduate students and professors worked to improve Ornge’s helicopter fleet by improving helicopter response times and increasing information on where to base the helicopters.

In the second project, which began in 2008, graduate students improved Ornge’s system for transferring patients by perfecting schedules for Ornge’s airplanes.

Tim Carnes Ph.D. ’10, a member of the Cornell team, said the Cornell researchers started their project with an assessment of Ornge’s daily problems. The researchers then worked to develop tools to solve those problems, Carnes said.

Russell MacDonald, Ornge’s medical director for research and development, contacted Henderson about working with Cornell ORIE graduate students. MacDonald said he hoped Cornell would help research ways to improve the everyday operations of the company.

According to MacDonald, Ornge did not have any initial cost-saving goals at the start of its collaboration with Cornell. As a non-profit organization, any money that Ornge saves goes back into the company to help improve access and provide service to more people.

“We knew there was room for improvement and an opportunity to optimize,” MacDonald said.

Ornge will not know to what extent the new system will improve efficiency until it is launched later this spring. Test runs, however, indicate the company will improve efficiency in its scheduled patient transfers by between eight and 15 percent, which translates to significant savings for the company, MacDonald said.

Related

Two Cornell alumni at NPR are enmeshed in a national scandal following the release of a controversial YouTube video Tuesday. Vivian Schiller ’83, NPR’s chief executive officer, stepped down from her post Wednesday morning after Ronald Schiller ’86, NPR’s senior vice president for fundraising, was caught on film condemning the Tea Party as racist.

Going to an all-female Catholic high school can have a lot of surprising influences on one’s sex life. While I hear tell that Catholic schoolgirls are supposed to be slutty (and while I did keep the shockingly unattractive pleated skirt in a sad hope for future role-play), I spent most of my formative years in piles of similarly plushy pubescent girls while we mouth-breathed and had Feelings about the latest pep rally.